As a boy growing up in Mississippi, I picked up the guitar my uncle had, learned how to play from him.  Uncle Jackie played Delta style blues, and that’s what I started with, until I moved up north.  Mama didn’t care for Uncle Jackie teaching me that guitar, when he’d slow down his whiskey life long enough to come around.  Mama and Daddy both worked hard.  Mama picked cotton when she was a girl, and after I was born she worked in the lunchroom at the school.  Daddy was a farmer, raised corn that hardly made money, and he cut hair part-time.  With my Mama and Daddy working like that, Mama didn’t appreciate no way and no how her bad brother teaching her one boy how to twang strings that weren’t intended for the glory of Jesus.  Mmm, mmm, mmm, no uh uh, Mama did not want me learning guitar.  So naturally I had to know it.  And that guitar got me out of those dead cotton fields, too, took me off up to Chicago, where I learned how to play the electric blues.

I did love and respect Mama, though, in spite of our disagreement over what’ll keep a man alive.  In 1967 I turned 24 years old, a grown man knowing everything I was ever going to need to know, yes man, I was full of fire and stupidity.  Mama knew that, and she tried to give me some advice, good advice, I can see that now, some of the best I ever had.  I wasn’t able to follow that advice, but I appreciate hearing it.  Before I left Mississippi, Mama said to me, “Moses, don’t go acting like a fool.”  Wouldn’t it be a better world if we could always do the right thing?  I been a fool more times than you’d want to mark on the calendar, and that was while I was still living in Chicago.  After I moved here to Philadelphia twelve years ago I kept adding to that list.  I look at myself now and I think “Mojo–what folks started calling me in Chicago–in all the years you been alive, you ain’t seen a man or a woman or a child nor any kind of animal was a bigger fool than you are right now.”  A man my age falling in love with a girl could be his granddaughter, a girl 21 years old, it’s just pitiful.  If it wasn’t me that done it, I wouldn’t even feel sorry for somebody with no more sense than that.

I got married in Chicago, to a good woman named Peggy.  Peggy had some schooling and worked as a bookkeeper for a company that ran apartments.  Most of my schooling was D flat and C sharp, and I got a job working for a construction company.  Man, them were some sharp times too, when I first moved up to Chicago.  People were fighting about the fighting in Vietnam, the Black Panthers were on TV.  I never was too interested in politics, but I did almost join the Black Panthers one time.  Well, no, I can’t say if I exactly was about to join, but I was going to a meeting, a guy I knew was coming by to pick me up and take me to the meeting.  But just before he got there I got a call to come down to a club I’d been wanting to play at, sit in with Son Tucker’s band.  Man, a chance to play with Son Tucker, I didn’t stand there thinking about what I ought to do.  I put my guitar in the case and started thinking about the chords to “Honey Bee”.  About ten minutes later the brother that was taking me to the Panthers meeting showed up, and I had to tell him I wasn’t going.  He was surprised and got mad about it, and when I told him I’d go another time, he said if that was all the dedication I had to freedom and equality for our people, maybe I should go back down south where they knew how to treat a nigger like me.  Yeah man, he was a sharp-tongued brother.  But he didn’t know about the blues, and the blues are bigger than me or him either one.  You can be free and equal and your baby can walk out the door and leave you wanting to die.

I was married to Peggy for thirteen years, and for thirteen years I carried plywood boards and two-by-fours, I nailed up drywall, and I learned how to be a brick mason, trying to behave like a real man and bring home something to live on.  And then at night I’d play guitar, do gigs when I could, hoping I might start to make enough money to quit the day job.  A lot of times Peggy would come to the clubs when I played, and I know she liked it.  That’s a good memory, to think sometimes what I did made Peggy happy.  I can use some good memories, because I got a lot of bad ones I’ve got to keep pushing out of the way.  Me and Peggy argued a lot too, since she wanted a better life than we could afford, and I’d say “Well, baby, I’m working hard.  What the hell you want me to do?”  What she wanted me to do was go to night school and get a better job.  So I could give up being a musician and try to get some education, get a better job, make Peggy happy, or I could give up Peggy.  I didn’t really want to give up Peggy, but we argued, and she cried, and I’d get depressed and want to play the blues even more than usual.  Finally I found a woman that was coming to a club where I played regular, and I started seeing her, sometimes in the evening or if I could get away for a while on the weekend.  After we’d been seeing each other on the sly like that for a while, I decided I was in love with her and I told Peggy I was leaving.  Talk about your bad memories, I wish I could have that part of my brain cut out.  So it wasn’t my baby walking out the door and leaving me wanting to die.  It was me doing that to her.  I was with my new woman for six months, and then we broke up.  By then Peggy had moved out of Chicago, and it was done for good between us, and I sure don’t blame her.  I worked a few more years as a brick mason, until I fell off a wall and broke my leg.  Since my busted leg never healed right, I started getting a disability paycheck from the insurance, and then I started living on that and playing music.

I got a small apartment now on 19th Street in Philadelphia, a good neighborhood, I like it alright.  And what with the disability and a few clubs I get by.  Don’t have nearly as many places in Philly to play blues, and I have to play at bars outside of the city, but the weather sure is better here than in Chicago.  I play at the Bayou Blues Club, at J.D’s Saloon, at Buzz’s Tavern.  So I get by.  One weekend a month I play over at Red Hot and Blue in New Jersey, two nights in a row on Friday and Saturday.  That’s where I met Calla, working there as a waitress.  She goes to college here in Philly, one of the smartest girls I ever met, nothing like me.  She’s smart, she’s real pretty, beautiful skin like chocolate, and I mean some kind of expensive imported chocolate, and she’s got a good sense of humor.  For eight months I been playing at that club, I see her two nights in a row once a month, and what happens to wreck my easy life?  I go and fall in love with her.  For a couple of months I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I just figured she was fun to talk to, cute to look at.  Then I realized I was telling myself, “You’re not in love with Calla,” like I was trying to convince myself.  That was a bad sign right there, until finally I just admitted it to myself.  I sure ain’t going to tell her.  I might be a fool, but I ain’t that big a fool.  When I see her at the club, she’ll come up and talk to me between sets, get me something to drink.  She’ll curl up her upper lip a little bit when she talks sometimes, I don’t know, I love that.  And if I make a joke and she laughs at it, I feel like we got a couple of seconds where nothing matters.  But I’m not dumb enough to think anything could ever happen between us.  I’m 59, she’s 21, I’m a country boy with no education, she’s in college, I limp around with one bad leg, she goes dancing with her friends.  No, nothing’s going to come of this except for me feeling bad.  And when I sing “Stand Around Crying” I sure be singing from the heart, man.

And

he 

laid

his

hands

upon

him, 

and 

gave

him

a

charge,

as

the

Lord

commanded

by

the

hand

of

Moses.